Bluetooth As A Way Of Sniffing Out Hidden Expensive Gadgets?

from the a-little-proof-please... dept

What is it about new technologies and crime that make people simply assume that it must be true? Last year we talked about police passing on urban legends about certain crimes. The latest questionable police warning is pointed out with reasonable skepticism by Engadget saying that police in the UK are warning that crooks are using Bluetooth to sniff out hidden computers and phones that people leave in their cars. The idea is that the crook would walk around with a Bluetooth-enabled phone and look for profiles to link up with. If one is there, then he knows that the car he's next to has something Bluetooth-enabled in it, making it worthwhile to break-in. Or, so goes the theory. The police don't seem to have any evidence of this, but they estimate that more than half of all car break-ins now involve this technique. They don't actually appear to have caught anyone who's done this, so it seems like someone came up with this possibility, and now they assume that any Bluetooth-enabled gadget that's been stolen must have been stolen that way.